Paula Wright, a retired nurse anesthetist from Grand Bay who served on the jury, said all 12 jurors voted to convict during the first straw poll after Mobile County Circuit Judge Rick Stout’s instructions.

Wright said the panel voted a couple more times and decided to discuss the evidence and concepts such as reasonable doubt. She said several members handled the guns entered into evidence, including the AR-15 assault rifle that prosecutors allege Jones used in the home invasion robbery and killing of Theodore resident Willie Sullivan Sr. and his teenage grandson, Glen Lavelle Sullivan Jr., in 2011.

“The evidence was that compelling. There was never a shadow of doubt,” she said. “Nobody even hesitated. … We just didn’t think we should come out that fast.”

Wright said she was surprised to learn after the trial that the defendant scored far below average on an IQ test. Because of those cognitive deficiencies – in keeping with U.S. Supreme Court precedent – prosecutors took the death penalty off the table.

The defense had wanted to call Jones’ mother to the witness stand to discuss her son’s learning disability in detail. But Stout ruled such evidence was inadmissible because the defendant’s intellectual capacity was not a defense.

Jurors, of course, had no inkling of any of that. They were outside the courtroom while defense lawyers and prosecutors debated those issues in front of the judge.

Wright said it would not have swayed her, anyway.

“I would have felt sorry for the mother, but we would have felt the same,” she said.

Wright said she felt the same way about defense efforts to tie the victim’s house to drugs. A running defense theme suggested that the Sullivan house had drugs and that that is why the robbers targeted it.

The prosecution vehemently denied there was any evidence to support that.

Wright said she agreed with a convicted drug dealer called to the stand by the defense in an effort to show that the neighborhood was a known drug area. The woman who testified asked defense lawyer Jason Darley what that had to do with the murder case.